Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones

Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones is tied to a village that has nearly vanished. Monkstown began as Blue Prairie, and the Handbook of Texas says a post office named for James Monks was open by 1878. A Tom Hymer column on the Commission's site credits Thomas Monks with the land. The village had a steam gristmill and gin by the mid-1880s, and Blue Prairie Lodge No. 488 was chartered there on December 12, 1878. The lower floor of its two-story Masonic building served as church and school, and the post office closed in 1927.

What the plaque says

Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones (Aug. 31, 1829 - June 11, 1903) A native of Alabama, William Chamberlayne Jones migrated to Texas in 1852 and resided near the Monkstown settlement in northeastern Fannin County. Trained as an attorney, he sold his Red River plantation after the Civil War and began studying medicine in New Orleans. He later served this area as a physician in the Grove Hill and Leonard communities. Jones and his wife Ellen O'Meara (Birmingham) had fifteen children. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 20 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 26 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Leonard — 0.3 mi
• Leonard — 0.4 mi
• East Shady Grove Baptist Church — 2.4 mi
• Valley Creek — 2.7 mi